Productivity application programs, such as word processing applications, spreadsheet applications, and presentation applications, enable users to create different types of documents. These documents may include data that is native to a particular document type and even to a particular application program. In order to view this native data, a user may view the document through the productivity application program that created the document. For example, a user may rely on a particular word processing application to view a word processing document that was created by the word processing application.
A problem can arise when documents are shared across the World Wide Web (hereinafter referred to as “web”) through web browsers. In particular, typical web browsers may not be capable of reading a given document in its native format. In order to address this problem, a web server can be implemented to execute code that is capable of rendering a document from its native format into a web-compatible format that can be viewed through the web browser.
Conventional implementations of such web servers render a document in its entirety prior to providing the rendered version to the web browser. This is sometimes referred to as document pre-rendering. During pre-rendering, a user who requests to view a given document may be forced to wait a significant amount of time before the document has been completely rendered. This delay can cause substantial frustration and inconvenience for the user.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.